The PPP yesterday said that it has made a “massive sweep” of the just-concluded local government elections, having won 48 out of the 71 local authority areas it contested.
At a press conference held at Freedom House, Stabroek News was also singled out by the party and accused of being “bias, flawed, discriminatory and racist” in its reportage of the results. The party said that the newspaper’s “screaming headlines” and analysis focused on government’s wins in heavily populated areas and not on the amount of seats that were won by contestants. It said that had it been analysed from that angle, it would clearly be seen that the PPP/C was the most successful.
It was while reading a prepared statement that PPP General Secretary Clement Rohee criticised this newspaper’s coverage, arguing that the bias was evident in the headlines of the Sunday and Monday (yesterday) editions.
In responding to the PPP’s claims, Stabroek News Editor-in-Chief Anand Persaud defended the newspaper’s coverage of the results. He said that the Sunday, March 20, report highlighted the pivotal contests in Georgetown and Bartica and utilised confirmed information. He said the newspaper was prepared to report on the outcomes of elections in Neighbourhood Democratic Councils but that up to Sunday night the Guyana Elections Commission (Gecom) had not provided any of these results. As it relates to the news item in yesterday’s Stabroek News, Persaud said this was important to underscore the extent of the PPP/C’s loss in Georgetown, moving from eight seats to two. Persaud noted that Georgetown was the largest and most important of the local authority areas.
Persaud also said that the popular vote tally would be another factor in assessing performance at last Friday’s polls.
Rohee also said that sections of the media, especially the Kaieteur News and this newspaper chose to ignore or editorialise the party’s weekly press statements and releases and “to bury them when they chose to publish parts at pages 21 to 24 of their respective newspapers.
“Take, for example, this weekend’s Stabroek News with the screaming headline, ‘APNU+AFC sweeps Georgetown, Linden and Bartica Polls.’ But why not ‘PPP sweeps 48 of 64 Local Authority Areas, APNU+AFC 16 with seven Local Authority Areas tied?’” he read from the statement.
Rohee questioned if the second headline he read would not have been a more objective and truthful reporting. “Or was it that the Stabroek News was fearful of being criticised by the government for being biased in favour of the PPP?” he asked.
“Further, Stabroek News in a wicked and obnoxious story chose to highlight Georgetown as though it was the beginning and the end all of local government elections in the country and that the voters in the other Local Authority Areas where the PPP won the overwhelming majority of votes do not matter. This smacks of a subtle racist and discriminatory editorial policy of the Stabroek News.” Rohee charged that Georgetown, while important, is only one of the local authority areas.
He said that whereas in the past the AFC managed to win some votes on the Corentyne in East Berbice and West Coast Berbice, the local government election results show that the AFC has been “completely demolished.”
He said that it is now self-evident that the AFC has been consumed by APNU.
“This is an obvious reality that the Guyanese electorate has recognised and this was reflected in the voters moving away from those who once misled them [and] voting instead for the PPP/C, resulting in it winning the majority of local authority areas [in] East and West Berbice, including the municipalities of Rose Hall and Corriverton in contradistinction to the much vaunted view that it was the PPP that was not interested in holding local government elections,” he said.
Rohee, responding to questions from the media, later said that the PPP during these elections did focus on its electoral base and in the end “it paid off.” He charged that in certain areas where the PPP did not get the plurality of votes, it managed to do that this time around.
PPP member Ganga Persaud, who was also present at the press conference, stated that the “figures don’t lie” and said that the party has won 75% of the votes. Persaud said that when compared with 1994, there is a clear turn around in the voting pattern as the PPP/C has managed to win areas it had not back then.
Persaud stressed that last year’s general elections and this one should not be compared. “They are not comparable. They are 71 different elections as against the general, which is one election and the regional elections,” he said. “If you are gonna analyse local government elections and the showing of political parties or groups that has to be done based on the understanding that these elections are separate…,” he said, while noting that the media might want to make sweeping generalisations by using population indices but this will just lead to an estimate. “Your assumption would be so flawed that it will not hold the test of time,” he said.
